Blizzard strangles own head to grow new disembodied one. Old one left in place to wither away on it’s abandoned body.

Off a newsgroup posting:

> I finally did the grinding needed for that last half-level and my warrior hit 58 tonight. As I understand it, I can now walk through some portal.>> Where is that portal?

That’s right. Why on earth is this poster going to spend one hour in the formerly 58-60 areas, and in the 60 end-game content? Why? You’d have to be an idiot, farming, or a farmer, to do so.

Killing some Fel Orcs in the minutes after this person has stepped through the portal will result in gear better than 95% of the player base found in the old world. Getting to 65-66 will find him being able to have replaced Tier 1 gear, had he ever gotten it. (However, his Warrior is in for a bit of a shock since most plate armor quest rewards have +Int and +Healing on them. He’ll have to make friends with the Sporeggar before he picks a new shield up.)

Gone are the reasons to go to BRD, LBRS, UBRS, or Molten Core. Gone is the reason to go work for Argent Dawn and go to Stratholme and Scholomance. The entire 58-60 game content has been eliminated as any value to the average World of Warcraft player. Replaced by seven zones in the Outlands.

Blizzard is most likely spending a lot of it’s time now developing content for the smallest fraction of it’s players. Pretty soon, maybe I’m just an optimist here, but I think Blizzard will be spending all it’s time developing content for nobody. 100% of it’s effort for 0% of it’s players. Imagine the creativity let loose when they don’t have actual constraints to worry about! I mean, if you don’t need to worry about players not having 30k health and +1000 mana regen/5s, the sky is the limit! They’ll knock our socks off (and leave us for dead).

I still love the game. But I’ll say it would blow us all away if they spent a little more time developing content for the rest of us too. We aren’t all level 70 yet. Some of us, shocking, yes, I know, actually still have characters in the 10-50 range, and like it that way.

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The 2.1 patch promises, IIRC, three new 70-only (flying mount access) sub-zones in Outland, complete with quests. So that will give my 70 more to do, if he ever manages to finish the last couple of zones he’s working.

I will agree that there is no point in running the “old” 58-60 content. But much of that was instance or raid content, and as my wife and I are running ‘casual’ and skipping instances, we only “lost” some high-end quests (unlike instance-runners and raiders). Plus, as I understand it, there are still some class-related quests in some “old” level 60 instances that keep them alive, even if on life-support so to speak.

Anyway, we jumped through the portal at level 58, having already ported to Shattrath at about level 50 and getting escort to Thrallmar for flight points and grandmaster training. With friends to buy the books and send mats, we also pushed the secondary professions past 300. Now we’re running at 60 in gear that probably exceeds Tier 0, and we haven’t even fully cleared Hellfire Peninsula yet. Having a blast, plenty to do, so far…

I really hope Blizz figures out that a vast majority of their game (20-58) is still vanilla. The did introduce a few new quests (maybe 2 per zone) with the 2.0 patch, but it’s just filler. I’m hoping that they do come to their senses and either add significant amounts of new quests, or even new zones. I hope for the former and doubt the later though. As is I have one 70 that I’m playing and the thought of playing my 53 hunter or 41 priest is just terrifying. Well, maybe not terrifying, but at least mind-numbing. My 45 Paladin isn’t as bad, as I can at least play that one with my wife, and it’s all new for her. But I really don’t see myself grinding my alts for a while.

BRD, LBRS, UBRS is seeing some action. Last night Fiancee and some other guildie’s did a stealth run for disenchantables. They’re all 65-70 and said with only three of them it was a breeze. Stealth past the trash, kill the boss, disenchant for shards. Later, rinse, repeat.